Is China planning a high-speed rail line to Canada?

A high-speed rail service could one day haul travellers from China to Canada, according to a pair of recent reports from Russian and Chinese state-funded news sites.

A high-speed rail service could one day haul travellers from China to Canada, according to a pair of recent reports from Russian and Chinese state-funded news sites.

What seems like a flight of fancy — a rail line that stretches from Asia to North America via a tunnel under the Bering Strait — could be on solid footing, according to the reports by China Daily and RIA Novosti.

The line would start in northeast China, run through Siberia, dive under the Bering Strait, daylight again in Alaska and continue into North America, according to the reports.

The rail journey from one end of the 13,000 kilometre route to the other would take less than two days at a speed of 350 km/h, according to Wang Mengshu, a railway expert at the Chinese Academy of Engineering who was quoted by China Daily.

The distance from Russia to Alaska across the Bering Strait is around 80 kilometres, but the tunnel would be more than twice that length, at around 200 kilometres, the China Daily report states. That is about four-times the length of the Channel Tunnel, which connects England to France.

The cost for the tunnel alone could be as much as $35-billion and up to $2-trillion for the overall project, according to an estimate by Fyodor Soloview, the founder of InterBering LLC, an Alaskan company pushing for the project, who was quoted by RIA Novosti.

Apart from the massive cost of the project, the harsh northern climates through which the rails would be built, and the enormous length of the line, there is at least one more massive complication to the plan — political will.

Getting China, Russia, the U.S. and Canada to green light the plan could be an enormous task, should the idea ever move beyond talk.

The Bering Strait tunnel is not the only ambitious high-speed rail tunnel idea being pushed by China.

The country is touting its high-speed rail technology as “already in place” for a railway tunnel it wants between China’s Fujian province and Taiwan, according to China Daily. Those plans are still in the works according to the article.

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